Real Food Works brings healthy meals to your doorstep

Lucinda Duncalfe, Founder and CEO of Real Food Works (left) and Vincent Totaro, Chef and Owner of Trattoria Totaro with a cooler of food at the Conshohocken Restaurant April 23, 2013. Real Food Works works with prominent restaurants to deliver prepared meals to their clients. Trattoria Tataro is one of several local reataurant participating with Real Food Works. Photo by Gene Walsh / Times Herald Staff

WEST CONSHOHOCKEN — If your best recipe for dinner is to pick up the phone and call your favorite restaurant for a dispatch, but you’re also trying to eat healthier, Real Food Works was invented for you.

Founded by a successful high-tech impresario with a passion for “real food,” the innovative start-up delivers specially prepared meals from local eateries to your door, in batches of five, 10 or 15.

“The food is a collaborative effort between us and the restaurants, so everything they cook for us is different than what’s on their own menus,” explained founder and CEO Lucinda Duncalfe.

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“We work with all local restaurants, owner-operated primarily, to develop meals that taste delicious and meet our very stringent nutritional requirements.”

Those requirements are as meticulous as they are simple, largely embracing food writer Michael Pollan’s “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” credo.

“It’s all about whole foods… no processed foods, no dairy or eggs, limited oil and salt,” said Duncalfe, whose staff reflects the culinary and nutritional expertise that she deemed equally important when starting the West Conshohocken-based company a year ago.

“The challenge is making great-tasting food within these dietary constraints, which the chefs totally do. We have a big preference for organic and local produce, but it’s up to the chefs to source the ingredients wherever they choose. We do have aspirations to help them with that one day because it’s a lot more challenging as a restaurant to get those kinds of ingredients.”

Trattoria Totaro in Conshohocken was the first restaurant to come aboard the Real Food Works concept, which now covers all counties in the area and will ultimately go nationwide.

“We design the menu and what the food and the food pyramid should look like, and share our best practices, but it’s absolutely the chefs’ creativity. It’s their flavor profile,” Duncalfe said.

The idea for engaging restaurants with her tech-fueled entrepreneurial savviness was sparked by Duncalfe’s own experience in losing weight and feeling re-invigorated from eating more healthfully, she recalled.

“I sold my last tech company in the summer of 2011, which coincided with the new eating style. I had some terrific results from eating the whole foods way and met a lot of people who had similar results but found it to be very difficult from a practical standpoint. As a busy professional working mom it was really difficult to always cook this way. Then I realized, if you look at the traffic of visitors at restaurants, it’s very high on the weekend, but levels off toward the middle of the week.”

Armed with a “powerhouse” team of culinary and nutritional sages, investors and advisers, Duncalfe proposed a mutually beneficial home delivery strategy to the restaurants — a fresher, more upscale take on the popular Nutrisystem program, as it were — that would more then compensate for that down time.

“The restaurants already know how to make great food, and they have the kitchen, which is expensive, and the staff that knows how to cook the food. Why can’t I just use all that to make food that’s actually healthy? It literally developed like that.”

The restaurants find out on Saturday which foods they will need to cook for the following Tuesday, when the meals are delivered to the RFW distribution center and then to customers.

“They deliver them to us and we deliver them to our customers, so each of our customers will get meals from many different restaurants each week. We’ll have 19 meals that we offer, and we send emails to subscribers on Wednesday, saying this is what’s available, from a standard menu, and they have until Friday to make any changes they want to.”

None of the Real Food plans requires a long-term commitment, and options range from five meals (dinners) for $89, plus $9 delivery, to 15 meals (five each of breakfast, lunch and dinner) for $189 with free delivery.

Meals retain freshness due to a specialized packaging system and arrive via a shopping bag-like cooler.

“The idea of getting a variety of meals from these well-known restaurants really appeals to people,” Duncalfe said. “A lot of times a restaurant might not be in your neighborhood so you might not know them, but you get to know them. A lot of times our customers will then go to visit the restaurant, so there’s the marketing angle for restaurant too. And they get to be known for cooking healthy food.”